Principled or Partisan? The Effect of Cancel Culture Framings on Support for Free Speech

• Author: James J. Fahey,Damon C. Roberts,Stephen M. Utych
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X221087601
• Published date: 01 January 2023
• Date: 01 January 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2023, Vol. 51(1) 69–75

© The Author(s) 2022

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/1532673X221087601

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Principled or Partisan? The Effect of Cancel

Culture Framings on Support for Free Speech

James J. Fahey

1

, Damon C. Roberts

2

, and Stephen M. Utych

3



Abstract

Political scientists have long been interested in the effects that media framings have on support or tolerance for controversial

speech. In recent years, the concept of cancel culture has complicated our understanding of free speech. In particular, the

modern Republican Party under Donald Trump has made “f‌ighting cancel culture”a cornerstone of its electora l strategy. We

expect that when extremist groups invoke cancel culture as a reason for their alleged censorship, support for their free speech

rights among Republicans should increase. We use a nationally representative survey experiment to assess whether individuals’

opposition to cancel culture is principled or contingent on the ideological identity of the speaker. We show that framing free

speech restrictions as the consequence of cancel culture does not increase support for free speech among Republicans. Further,

when left-wing groups utilize the cancel culture framing, Republicans become even less supportive of those groups’free spee ch

rights.

Keywords

cancel culture, free speech, partisan motivated reasoning, survey experiment

Introduction

The term cancel culture has become ubiquitous in American

politics. Originating on Black Twitter, a subcommunity of

Twitter users dedicated to issues affecting the African-

American community, “cancelling”someone was origi-

nally understood as a last-ditch effort designed to hold in-

dividuals responsible for hateful speech (Clark, 2020). Yetthe

term was swiftly co-opted by conservative commentators,

who fashioned the term “cancel culture”to describe what they

perceived as the increasing censoriousness of American

political discourse, where right-wing individuals are unfairly

punished (or “cancelled”) for expressing unpopular opinions.

Such outrage calls to mind similar moral panics in the 1990s

surrounding “political correctness,”where conservative

Americans similarly lambasted the “overly sensitive”and

“self-serious”left for seeking to police potentially hurtful

speech against marginalized groups. In this most recent wave

of moral outrage, Republicans across all levels of government

have decried cancel culture as responsible for events as di-

verse in nature and scale as Donald Trump’s insurrection

related impeachment trial, to the f‌iring of The Mandalorian

actress Gina Carano by Disney after her posting of anti-

Semitic tweets.

Fighting the nebulous term has transcended mere rhe-

torical strategy and become an institutional cornerstone of the

Republican Party under Donald Trump. For instance, the

2021 edition of the inf‌luential Conservative Political Action

Conference (CPAC) focused on the theme “America Un-

canceled,”featuring a speech by Trump’s former primary

opponent Senator Ted Cruz bemoaning cancel culture for

ruining Saturday Night Live. Republican elites increasingly

signal that cancel culture is a dangerous assault on free

speech,

1

and Republicans have received the message: they are

more likely to view cancel culture as censorship, mean-

spirited, and an attack on American society (Pew, 2021).

Weargue that the useof the term cancel culture by political

elites and parts of the media is an example of framing: a

sociological process wherein individuals selectively em-

phasize certain aspects of a social issue over another in order

to privilege certain understandings of the world, and which is

critical for the formation of public opinion (Carter, 2013;

Chong and Druckman 2007). Likewise, cancel culture frames

may alarm conservatives by potentially reducing acceptable

forms of speech—and when threatened, conservatives are

more likely to endorse objectionable forms of speech, in-

cluding hate speech (Christiani, 2021). Furthermore, we

1

University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

2

University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

3

Boise State University, Boise, ID, USA

Corresponding Author:

James J. Fahey, Department of Political Science, University of Florida,

Anderson Hall, 1507 W. University Ave, Gainesville, FL 32611-7011, USA.

Email: jamesfahey@uf‌l.edu